Customer Story: Facebook Employees Collaborate in BlueJeans

About Facebook

The ability for employees across Facebook to see each other in meetings fosters a much more collaborative environment than email, chat and phone calls alone.

If you look across some of the successful startups that have emerged from Silicon Valley, one common theme is a strong startup culture, stemming from the founders and early employees.

One of the biggest success stories in recent years has been Facebook. Founded in 2004, the company continues to expand rapidly across the globe with over 900 million active users. To serve these subscribers globally, Facebook has operations in 26 cities and continues to expand worldwide.

The Challenge

With unprecedented growth and success comes a greater responsibility to ensure that the original vision and corporate values are maintained across the company. Given the global nature of Facebook’s operations, it has been challenging to get people from diverse backgrounds and cultures to collaborate efficiently and maintain the high levels of performance that typically characterize the Facebook culture. Geographical distances and technology barriers complicate things further.

One way Facebook has addressed these issues is with video conferencing. As the company has grown, it has become increasingly important to maintain its open, intimate, and fast-moving culture. One of the key strategies in this effort is the use of video. The ability for employees across the company to see each other in meetings fosters a much more collaborative environment than email, chat and phone calls alone.

Facebook already had a number of video conference rooms at its headquarters and its larger sites, but was looking for a way to expand the reach of video conferencing to employees who didn’t have access to those rooms, including telecommuters and employees at smaller sites who preferred desktop and mobile technologies like Skype.

The available solutions to link these two worlds were cumbersome and expensive. Classic room-based conferencing systems could only connect to other room-based systems, and Skype users could only talk to other Skype users.

Facebook + BlueJeans

Then Facebook discovered BlueJeans. BlueJeans Meetings is a cloud-based video conferencing service designed to make video meetings as easy, interoperable and affordable as audio meetings. Customers use their existing video conferencing devices and connect them through the BlueJeans cloud.

With BlueJeans, a single meeting can handle many different participants in multiple locations, using any video-enabled device. Every Facebook employee can have their own personal meeting room in the BlueJeans cloud that can be used to schedule and host video meetings on demand. Participants join a meeting by dialing a number or clicking on a URL.

With BlueJeans, Facebook can continue to expand rapidly and not worry about diluting its culture. Today, Facebook employees around the world see each other and work more collaboratively in their BlueJeans.